Shell shock thesis

The prevalence of anti-Semitism meant that it was easy to depict the Jewish Oppenheim as alien and unpatriotic when his ideas seemed to threaten the full-blooded pursuit of the war.

Shell shocked soldiers felt themselves to be less than men; they were also viewed by others as displaying feminine characteristics. The failure to comment on these aspects of identity undermines the analysis in places.

He convincingly argues that when forced to acknowledge male hysteria, physicians have employed a range of strategies which served to minimise its importance; but if these doctors had been completely unable to countenance the psychological frailty male hysteria threatened, then they would have left no record of it at all, and this history could not have been written.

It also tends to underestimate the spread of psychodynamic theories before and to overestimate their acceptance during and immediately after the war.

During the war, shell shock was understood in many different ways: Words written by accident and then crossed out show memory running ahead of the ability to put experiences into words p.

A few things I would like to point out in the article are the conflict defining when a soldier was ready to return to the battlefield after regeneration at the hospital.

For others, the differences in diagnostic terminology are meaningless, and what is important is that these labels have the same subject: The article also considers what relation, if any, might exist between intellectual and other histories, literary approaches, and perceptions of trauma as timeless and unchanging.

It is likely, however, that stories of rupture will be replaced with tales of gradual evolution, that a more complex understanding of historical conceptualizations of mind—body relations will need to be employed, and that the interplay and overlap between the self-ascribed subject matter and the approaches of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and related disciplines in the early twentieth century will become more evident.

The final chapter, on Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis, poses certain challenges. By this comparison of symptoms and diagnostic criteria, the two syndromes do not match up: In turn, our perceptions of this originating conflict are shaped by what we have learnt or imagine we now know about the costs of war.

In many times and places, it has been ignored or acknowledged only informally or in passing. The collectivist ethos of medical men meant that the ends were seen to justify the means. As gender dichotomies were constructed and strengthened within science and culture, female hysteria flourished in medical discourse while male hysteria was submerged.

Overall the context of the article is very objective and very few adjectives are used.

Back to 2 M. This article does not claim to resolve these issues; rather, it is an attempt to work out some of the problems involved in writing the history of shell shock, to consider its relation to the much wider category of trauma, and to explore some of the meanings inscribed on this diagnosis.

Such a crump has just fallen. This article, which focuses on Britain, extends scholarly analyses which question characterizations of shell shock as an early form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Back to 12 M. The way the quotes from the war itself gives an insight knowledge, which can be used to establish a realistic image of that time.

The thesis argues that the importance of shell-shock therefore extended beyond its putative effect on British psychology. From the point of view of the medical historian, the differences in these labels, the nuances of opinion they reveal and conceal, are fascinating and integral to understanding the construction of trauma as a diagnosis.

One of the things the public looks for is a way of plugging gaps in the imagination, of making sense of the past in a way that dry historiographical debates do not tend to provide.

The condition, which can lead to memory loss, depression, and anxiety, has much in common with wartime descriptions of shell shock.To this extent, his research mounts only a limited challenge to conventional views of shell shock as a gendered diagnosis, and even confirms a.

During the First World War, thousands of soldiers were treated for “shell shock,” a condition which encompassed a range of physical and psychological Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World and those doctors who referred to it did not usually agree with all its conclusions.

56 This fitted into my broader thesis that shell shock did. Shell-shock and shell concussion cases should have the letter “W” prefixed to the report of the casualty, if it was due to the enemy; in that case the patient would be entitled to rank as “wounded” and to wear on his arm a “wound stripe”.

There have been several great thesis and books made by Aussie and Canadian Historians and. The thesis argues that the importance of shell-shock therefore extended beyond its putative effect on British psychology. Theories of the war neuroses were a microcosm of debates on the nature of modernity, its nebulous effects on the individual, and its consequences for society.

During the First World War, thousands of soldiers were treated for “shell shock,” a condition which encompassed a range of physical and psychological Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World and those doctors who referred to it did not usually agree with all its conclusions.

56 This fitted into my broader thesis that shell shock did. Dissertation submitted to the University of Sheffield in partial The third and final part of the thesis is a critical appraisal of the shell concussion and shell shock which was considered to be psychological, not neurological in origin.